Enlightenment engineers: meditation and mindfulness in Silicon Valley

Chade-Meng Tan is perched on a chair, his lanky body folded into
a half-lotus position. "Close your eyes," he says. His voice is a
hypnotic baritone, slow and rhythmic, seductive and gentle. "Allow
your attention to rest on your breath: The in-breath, the
out-breath, and the spaces in between." We feel our lungs fill and
release. As we focus on the smallest details of our respiration,
other thoughts -- of work, of family, of money -- begin to recede,
leaving us alone with the rise and fall of our chests. For
thousands of years, these techniques have helped put practitioners
into meditative states. Today is no different. There's a palpable
silence in the room. For a moment, all is still. I take another
breath.

The quiet is broken a few minutes later, when Meng, as he is
known, declares the exercise over. We blink, smile at one another,
and look around our makeshift zendo -- a long, fluorescent-lit
presentation room on Google's corporate campus in Silicon Valley.
Meng and most of his pupils are Google employees, and this
meditation class is part of an internal course called Search Inside
Yourself. It's designed to teach people to manage their emotions,
ideally making them better workers in the process. "Calm the mind,"
Meng says, getting us ready for the next exercise: a meditation on
failure and success.

More than a thousand Googlers have been through Search Inside
Yourself training. Another 400 or so are on the waiting list and
take classes like Neural Self-Hacking and Managing Your Energy in
the meantime. Then there is the company's bimonthly series of
"mindful lunches," conducted in complete silence except for the
ringing of prayer bells, which began after the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited in 2011. The search giant
even recently built a labyrinth for walking meditations.

It's not just Google that's embracing Eastern traditions. Across
the Valley, quiet contemplation is seen as the new caffeine, the
fuel that allegedly unlocks productivity and creative bursts.
Classes in meditation and mindfulness -- paying close,
nonjudgmental attention -- have become staples at many of the
region's most prominent companies. There's a Search Inside Yourself Leadership
Institute now teaching the Google meditation method to
whoever wants it. The cofounders of Twitter and Facebook have made
contemplative practices key features of their new enterprises,
holding regular in-office meditation sessions and arranging for
work routines that maximise mindfulness. Some 1,700 people showed
up at a Wisdom 2.0
conference held in San Francisco in February, with top
executives from LinkedIn, Cisco, and Ford featured among the
headliners.

These companies are doing more than simply seizing on Buddhist
practices. Entrepreneurs and engineers are taking millennia-old
traditions and reshaping them to fit the Valley's goal-oriented,
data-driven, largely atheistic culture. Forget past lives; never
mind nirvana. The technology community of Northern California wants
return on its investment in meditation. "All the woo-woo mystical
stuff, that's really retrograde," says Kenneth Folk, an influential
meditation teacher in San Francisco. "This is about training the
brain and stirring up the chemical soup inside."

It can be tempting to dismiss the interest in these ancient
practices as just another neo-spiritual fad from a part of the
country that's cycled through one New Age after another. But it's
worth noting that the prophets of this new gospel are in the tech
companies that already underpin so much of our lives. And these
firms are awfully good at turning niche ideas into things that
hundreds of millions crave.

Many of the people who shaped the personal computer industry and
the Internet were once members of the hippie counterculture. So an
interest in Eastern faiths is all but hardwired into the modern
tech world. Steve Jobs spent months searching for gurus in India
and was married by a Zen priest. Before he became an American
Buddhist pioneer, Jack Kornfield ran one of the first mainframes at
Harvard Business School.

But in today's Silicon Valley, there's little patience for what
many are happy to dismiss as "hippie bullshit." Meditation here
isn't an opportunity to reflect upon the impermanence of existence
but a tool to better oneself and improve productivity. That's how
Bill Duane, a pompadoured onetime engineer with a tattoo of a
bikini-clad woman on his forearm, frames Neural Self-Hacking, an
introductory meditation class he designed for Google. "Out in the
world, a lot of this stuff is pitched to people in yoga pants," he
says. "But I wanted to speak to my people. I wanted to speak to me.
I wanted to speak to the grumpy engineer who may be an atheist, who
may be a rationalist."

Duane's pitch starts with neuroscience and evolutionary biology.
"We're basically the descendants of nervous monkeys," he says, the
kind with hair-trigger fight-or-flight responses. In the modern
workplace, these hyperactive reflexes are now a detriment, turning
minor squabbles into the emotional equivalents of kill-or-be-killed
showdowns. In such situations, the amygdala -- the region of the
brain believed to be responsible for processing fear -- can
override the rest of the mind's ability to think logically. We
become slaves to our monkey minds.

Repeated studies have demonstrated that meditation can
rewire how the brain responds to stress. Boston University
researchers showed that after as little as three and a half hours
of meditation training, subjects tend to react less to emotionally
charged images. Other research suggests that meditation improves
working memory and executive function. And several studies of
long-term practitioners show an increased ability to concentrate on
fast-changing stimuli. One paper cited by the Google crew even
implies that meditators are more resistant to the flu.

But Googlers don't take up meditation just to keep away the
sniffles or get a grip on their emotions. They are also using it to
understand their coworkers' motivations, to cultivate their own
"emotional intelligence" -- a characteristic that tends to be in
short supply among the engineering set. "Everybody knows this EI
thing is good for their career," says Search Inside Yourself
founder Meng. "And every company knows that if their people have
EI, they're gonna make a shitload of money."

Meng has had quite a career himself, joining Google in 2000 as
employee number 107 and working on mobile search. But for years,
his attempts to bring meditation into the office met with limited
success. It was only in 2007, when he packaged contemplative
practices in the wrapper of emotional intelligence, that he saw
demand spike. Now there are dozens of employee development programs
at Google that incorporate some aspect of meditation or
mindfulness. And Meng -- who was born in Singapore and was turned
on to Buddhism by an American nun -- has slowly ascended to icon
status within the company. More than one Search Inside Yourself
student has asked Meng for his autograph.

There is in fact little data to support the notion that
meditation is good for Google's bottom line, just a few studies
from outfits like the Conference Board showing that emotionally
connected employees tend to remain at their current workplaces.
Still, the company already tends to its employees' physical needs
with onsite gyms, subsidised massages, and free organic meals to
keep them productive. Why not help them search for meaning and
emotional connection as well?

Duane, for one, credits Google's meditation program with
upgrading both his business and personal life. It wasn't long ago
that he was a stress case, and with good reason: He was leading a
30-person site-reliability team while dealing with his father's
life-threatening heart disease. "My typical coping strategy -- the
bourbon and cheeseburger method -- wasn't working," he says. Then
Duane attended a lecture Meng arranged on the neuroscience of
mindfulness and quickly adopted a meditation practice of his
own.

Duane believes the emotional regulation he gained from
meditation helped him cope with his father's eventual death. The
increased ability to focus, he says, was a major factor in his
promotion to a management post where he oversaw nearly 150
Googlers. In January he decided to leave the company's cadre of
engineers and concentrate full-time on bringing meditation to more
of the organisation. Google executives, who have put mindfulness at
the centre of their internal training efforts, OK'd the switch.

Duane still doesn't have much use for hippies. He still
professes to be a proud empiricist. But when I walk back into the
Search Inside Yourself class, neither he nor any of the other
Googlers seem at all fazed when Meng tells us to imagine the
goodness of everyone on the planet and to visualise that goodness
as a glowing white light.

As before, Meng's voice lowers and slows to a crawl. And, of
course, we close our eyes. "When you breathe in, breathe in all
that goodness into your heart. Using your heart, multiply that
goodness by 10," he says, in a variation on a Tibetan Tonglen
exercise. "When you breathe out, send all that goodness to the
whole world. And if it's useful to you, you may visualise yourself
breathing out white light -- brilliant white light -- representing
this abundance of goodness." We exhale. I actually feel a buzzing
on the underside of my skull as I try to imagine pure love. For a
minute, I forget that we're in a room ordinarily reserved for
corporate presentations.

Search inside yourself might have remained a somewhat isolated
phenomenon in the Valley if a mindfulness instructor named Soren
Gordhamer hadn't found himself divorced, broke, out of a
job, and stuck in the town of Dixon, New Mexico (population 1,500).
Gordhamer, who had spent years teaching yoga and meditation in New
York City's juvenile detention centres, was feeling increasingly
beleaguered by his seemingly uncontrollable Twitter habit. He
decided to write a book -- Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the
Creative and Constantly Connected -- that offered tips for using
technology in a mindful manner.

The book wasn't exactly a best seller. But Gordhamer struck a
nerve when he described how hard it was to focus in our always-on
culture. By providing constant access to email, tweets, and
Facebook updates, smartphones keep users distracted, exploiting the
same psychological vulnerability as slot machines: predictable
input and random payouts. They feed a sense that any pull of the
lever, or Facebook refresh, could result in an information
jackpot.

And so he got the idea to host a conference where the technology
and contemplative communities could hash out the best ways to
incorporate these tools into our lives -- and keep them from taking
over. The event, billed as Wisdom 2.0, was held in April 2010 and
drew a couple hundred people.

That was three years ago; since then attendance at the now
annual conference has shot up 500 percent. In 2013 nearly 1,700
signed up to hear headliners like Arianna Huffington, LinkedIn CEO
Jeff Weiner, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, and, of course, Meng
talk about how they run their enterprises mindfully. Gordhamer has
become a Silicon Valley superconnector, with an array of contacts
that would make an ordinary entrepreneur burst with envy. He now
leads private retreats for the technorati, and more conferences are
in the works -- one just for women, another to be held in New York
City. "Everywhere you turn at Wisdom," says PayPal cofounder Luke
Nosek, "it's like, 'Oh my God, you're here too?'"